Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (12 page)

I heard steps, turned. The tall girl said she would take me to Chas.

I thumbed at the wheelbarrow. “Is this for sale?”

“Of course.”

“How much?”

“That piece is forty-six hundred.”

New York.

*   *   *

The cheap elevator had obviously been added just to meet handicapped-access regs. While we waited for it I introduced myself. The tall girl looked at my hand a few seconds, took it. “I’m A,” she said.

“A?”

She blushed some and nodded. The elevator doors rattled open. We stepped in. “What’s your real name?” I said.

“Alexandra.”

“Not cool enough for New York?”

“Apparently not.”

“But a nice name back in … Wisconsin?”

Quick swivel. “How’d you know?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Give it six more months, nobody’ll be able to tell.”

The doors opened. I stepped into Chas Weinberg’s apartment.

I’d expected it to be more or less like the gallery downstairs—cold, black, modern. It wasn’t. The first thing I noticed was light, plenty of it: huge windows on the north and east sides. Even on a rainy day it was bright, especially compared to the gallery. The second thing I noticed was quiet music. No Germans banging on washtubs; jazz guitar instead, coming from hidden speakers.

It was a big space, this room alone an easy forty by forty. I wondered if Weinberg owned the building. If he did, he was a rich man.

Some of the furniture was squared off, modern, the way I expected. But some was old as hell and hand-carved. I saw walnut, ebony, southern yellow pine. The styles, ages, and woods were jumbled, but they all looked right together.

Here and there on the walls were paintings, perfectly lit. I didn’t recognize them, but from the way they were presented I figured they were the cream of the crop.

As I scanned I did a double take: I’d nearly missed Chas Weinberg himself, sitting in a peach-colored chair not six feet away from me. Next to him were an end table and a matching chair.

He sat still, legs crossed, taking me in. I faced him and did the same. He was deep into his eighties, thin. Even sitting he looked tall, had to’ve been my height in his prime. Still-thick white hair flowed from a widow’s peak, and his eyebrows matched the hair. His face was craggy in the right way.

Chas Weinberg motioned with a long hand. “Sit, sir, I insist. Sit and tell me why an old mediocrity like Tander Phigg bothered to hang himself.”

His voice was higher than I expected, but it wasn’t squeaky—was almost a singsong. Weinberg was used to hearing himself talk, and he didn’t mind the sound.

As I sat, a man whipped silently past, silver tray in hand. He was dressed like the ones downstairs, black on black on black, buzz cut up top. But he looked older than Evan and Alexandra. Pushing thirty, maybe. He unloaded the tray on the table: coasters, two tall glasses, pitcher of water, no ice. He poured, then turned to leave. Weinberg snapped his fingers. “Wait here please, Esio.”

Esio stopped, spun, stood at attention.

Weinberg leaned, extended a long hand. “Charles Weinberg, sir. You are?”

I said my name.

“A pleasure, Mister Sax. Before we discuss Tander Phigg, crashing bore and suicide, will you humor me on a point?”

“Sure.”

He pointed at my T-shirt. “What is this?” He saw the question in my eyes. “This ‘Champion Spark Plugs’? Que es?”

I looked down. “For crying out loud, Champion Spark Plugs are Champion Spark Plugs. The shirt’s a freebie from when I ran my own shop. You know, the sales reps come by with stuff.”

“Yes, but what
is
it? What is Champion Spark Plugs? I ask because that’s a truly iconic logotype. And what sort of shop did you run?”

I looked at him awhile. I wondered if he was kidding around, decided he wasn’t. Esio had produced a BlackBerry and stood with thumbs poised to take notes.

I said, “Champion and spark plugs is like McDonald’s and hamburgers.”

Weinberg nodded over tented fingers. “Esio,” he said, “see if anybody’s done anything with this Champion Spark Plugs.” Esio was already on it, thumb-typing away.

I said, “My shop worked on European cars. Mostly Germans, but some Saabs and Volvos, too.”

“Really!” He looked me up and down with smiling eyes. I half wanted to punch him in the face, or at least pull my Sharpie again. Weird thing, though: The other half of me wanted to please Weinberg, wanted to keep him interested. I said, “Before that I raced cars. NASCAR.”

“Goodness,” he said. “Were you a television superstar, walking around in one of those cute little billboard jumpsuits? Did you hold hands with your Implants Barbie wife and pretend to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’?”

“Drank myself out of a ride before I made the big time,” I said. “That’s how I met Tander Phigg. AA.”

Weinberg sighed, sipped water. Esio left us. As he disappeared behind a Japanese-looking screen, his BlackBerry rang.

I gave Weinberg a two-minute recap on Phigg. He listened well. When I was done he tapped his teeth and squinted. “’Twas many years ago, and Tander Phigg was a barely memorable player during a very memorable time. Indeed, but for that awful name I doubt I’d recall him at all.”

Esio returned, silent as usual. Weinberg sensed him and flicked a go-away hand, but Esio approached anyway and spoke in his ear, then stood at attention.

“Evan downstairs wants to call the police and report a hate crime,” Weinberg said. “Please explain.”

I explained. When I was done Weinberg looked at me ten seconds. Then he threw his head back and laughed like hell. Esio took the cue, laughing just as hard and for exactly the same duration.

Finally Weinberg took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his blue suit and dabbed the corners of his eyes. He said to Esio, “Tell Evan to put down the phone, take the rest of the day off, and return tomorrow with a clean forehead.”

“Bug and tar remover,” I said.

They looked at me. “Bug and tar remover, like you use to clean the front of your car?” I said. “It’ll take that Sharpie right off. You can get it at Walmart, if there’s one nearby.”

Weinberg cracked up again, doubling over, saying “bug and tar remover” over and over. When he had it out of his system he told Esio to relay the message. “And
do
get a picture of Evan before he leaves, please.”

I let him settle down. After a while I said, “Tander Phigg.”

“Of course,” he said. “As noted, he was a mediocrity, a not-quite. I believe the current word is
wannabe
.”

I waited. Weinberg sipped water and squinted at nothing, pulling memories. I listened to a jazz duo, guitar and bass, on the invisible speakers.

Finally Weinberg nodded to himself and told it.

He thought Phigg had appeared on the scene in 1960 or so. I asked if it could be ’58. He snapped his fingers and said yes, it was before JFK.

By then, Weinberg was an established kingpin in Manhattan’s modern art and queer scenes. He’d graduated from Yale in ’43, had done a Navy stint counting crates on New York Harbor docks at the tail end of World War II. Then he’d launched one of the first avant-garde studios. In 1949, he said, he’d bought the building we were sitting in.

In 1958, when Phigg wandered down from Fitchburg and declared himself a boho photographer, carpetbaggers like him were a dime a dozen to New York’s artsy types. “So predictable,” Weinberg said. “The ghastly portfolio, the Charlie Parker fetish, the two-month beard, the Karl Marx phase, the Jackson Pollock phase. Of course, the gay tryst was often part of the checklist, and we didn’t complain about
that
.”

Weinberg meandered for ten minutes, rehashing stories from the time that had nothing to do with Phigg. I let him, hoping he’d talk his way around to a Phigg memory sooner or later.

It paid off. Weinberg snapped his fingers. “He was a photographer, wasn’t he?”

I nodded.

“I remember because they were at the absolute bottom of the totem pole, all those boys from Indiana who bought Hasselblads because they couldn’t draw a straight line.” Weinberg nodded, remembering like hell now. “A few of us were forced to admit, bitterly and with no goodwill whatsoever, mind you, that this Phigg might have a dram of actual
talent
.”

The memory led to others. There’d been rumors that Phigg’s father was loaded, even more so than most carpetbaggers’ parents. The rumors were confirmed when he invited a few of Weinberg’s comrades to his apartment—that doorman building on the Upper West Side.

Weinberg looked at me like he’d delivered a punch line, but from my nonreaction he saw I didn’t get it. “It was the worst thing he could have
done,
don’t you see? Any credibility he’d built up through merit was dashed forever when we learned he was merely slumming down here.”

“Why?”

“Because it was a
revolution,
dear heart. We were proud to live the way we lived. This was very early, before SoHo was SoHo, really. I’d bought this building with money I didn’t have. I daresay it’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but we didn’t know that then. I didn’t rent out lofts to be trendy; I rented out lofts to pay the mortgage.”

“But the kids you rented to, the carpetbaggers,” I said. “They
all
had rich daddies, didn’t they?”

“Of course, but they had the decency to hide the fact,” he said. “And Tander Phigg’s failure to grasp that was indicative. He never quite
got
it. He was a born outsider.”

I thought about that. “He wasn’t enough of a phony.”

“If you insist.” He waved that long hand, thumbed his chin, remembered some more. “As I say, it just about dashed his credibility forever. Everybody froze him out for a year or more. And you haven’t seen a proper freeze-out until you’ve seen one conducted by a bunch of art queens. Tander Phigg might as well have been invisible.”

A gust slapped rain against the windows like bird shot, hard enough to make us both look.

After a while I said, “So you all gave him the cold shoulder for a year. Did he make a comeback?”

“He did, bless his heart, and a grand one at that. Some said it was calculated. Bosh and piffle, said I, Tander Phigg wasn’t capable of such cunning.”

He wanted me to ask.

I waited.

But he waited better: He half turned in his chair, picked up a glass and the pitcher, poured.

“You win,” I said. “What was Phigg’s big move?”

He poured himself water, sipped, looked at the glass, savored his moment. “He took up with Myna Roper.”

I waited, watching Weinberg hide a smirk.

Finally I said, “Who the hell is Myna Roper?”

“Beautiful girl, an Amazon, six feet tall and the prettiest skin I’ve ever seen. She handled phones and filing for a piano mover down the block, if memory serves. But what made her interesting was that she sat as a model, here and in the Village, to augment her income.”

I poured myself a glass of water, watched Weinberg smile at nothing. “She was sketched and shot by thousands of horny little carpetbagger artist-boys,” he said. “She had the surprisingly rare capability of working in the nude and maintaining some dignity about it, which tended to make the horny little artist-boys hornier, you see?”

“No.”

“She played both virgin and whore in their sticky little dreams, and thus cowed the absolute hell out of them.”

“So Phigg worked up the guts to ask out a cute model,” I said. “Was it really that big a deal?”

“Oh dear, I left out a pertinent detail.” Weinberg sipped to mask his smirk, then set down his glass and looked me in the eye. “Mister Sax, Myna Roper was a great strapping negress. Black as the ace of spades, in fact.”

CHAPTER NINE

We felt another gust, watched rain rattle windows. “White guy dating a black girl,” I said. “What year are we up to?”

“’Sixty-one. It’s easy to pinpoint because we were all giddy over JFK and Jackie. Camelot, you know, ‘Ahsk not.…’ All things were possible, which is why Tander Phigg’s timing was exquisite, whether by luck or design.”

“So nobody held it against them?”

Weinberg laughed. “
Against
them? They became celebrities, an absolute must-have couple at parties and openings! They were instant A-listers, though we lacked the term.”

“Invite the mixed couple, prove how … naughty you are?”

“I’m sure we all preferred ‘progressive’ or ‘forward thinking,’ but basically, yes.”

“Phigg went from the shithouse to the penthouse, just like that.”

“Well put!” Weinberg said. “I don’t think he realized exactly
why,
second-rater that he was. We used to have endless arguments about the couple. Some styled Tander Phigg a Machiavellian mastermind, especially when he parlayed Myna into a couple of one-man shows. I said nonsense, the schlemiel simply loves the girl. You could see it in his dull little eyes.”